Renaissance Man

Like his daughter Dora, my Great-Grandfather Silvestras was an intriguing character. Had he been born in my generation, then Silvestras would have been a visionary innovator poised on the edge of technological genius.

We aren't certain how Silvestras—literally—came to win Zigmunta's hand. Despite the peculiar start to their marriage, Silvestras and Zigmunta raised three children together: Edvardas, who died of a ruptured appendix on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday; my maternal Grandmother, Jadzė, who fell to cancer in her early forties, and; Dora, who lived into her mid-nineties, and who died one year after Lithuania regained its independence.

Silvestras first worked in a high school as a music and piano teacher. That profession grew less attractive once Silvestras saw that students don't take music and art teachers seriously. One afternoon—probably in the late 1920s—pupils started pummeling Silvestras with paper airplanes as he sat at his piano bench, his back to the class. That was the last day he taught in a school.

Silvestras then devoted the remainder of his career to piano tuning and repair.

My Mom spent summer vacations in Mariampolis, Lithuania, at the home of her Grandparents. She has textured memories of Silvestras. Silvestras grew his own tobacco. He dried the harvested leaves in the attic. On summer days, Silvestras sat at the dining room table methodically clipping the dried tobacco while he read Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days aloud to my Mom.

Silvestras, like many Lithuanian men, exceled in the folk art of woodcarving. He created toys for my Mom and often crafted walking sticks—another form native art. Silvestras once carved a "špyga," a crude hand gesture, onto the head of a walking stick. Rattling a špyga is equivalent to "giving the finger" in the United States. When someone agitated Silverstras, Silvestras shook the walking stick in the offender's face, thereby avoiding making the impolite gesture himself.

Silvestras carved a violin. He also designed and built a working thermometer and barometer that seems to have been modeled on a cuckoo clock. When the weather was sunny, two wooden children would emerge from the device carrying flower bouquets. When it rained, they stepped out with umbrellas over their heads.

Finally, Silvestras was a master gardener. He grafted branches so that different varieties of fruit would mature on the same tree. Silvestras grew wonderful apples from which he fermented a sweet wine. He even kept a bee hive, and he designed a centrifuge to collect the honey.

Silvestras traveled alone in 1941 to spend Christmas with my Mom's family in Kaunas. Silvestras was in his mid-eighties, and the Nazis had just begun their occupation of Lithuania. Silvestras fell ill and, without antibiotics available to assist him, he acquired pneumonia and died.

Mariampolis, Lithuania, December 24, 1936. My Mom's maternal Grandfather, Silvestras, tunes a piano. The portrait on the top the piano is this one.